⋙Why are streaming, capture or overlay applications being impacted by these security measures?
The methods that some third-party applications use to add features (inserting code into the game client) are the same as some of the methods hackers and cheaters use to disrupt the experience of other players. As a part of our security efforts, we have designed Destiny 2 for PC to resist all attempts from external applications to insert code into the game client.
It is a high priority for us to ensure that Destiny 2 is a safe and fair experience for all players, on all platforms. We remain committed to creating a positive and fair in-game experience in all of our products, and believe that this is a necessary measure in bringing you a great gaming experience in Destiny 2 on PC.

That said I’m seeing this already blowing up on various social media.

Somewhere a security programmer is sitting at home telling his friends “I told them this would happen” in regards to his boss having the brilliant idea of “We’ll just ban all code injection that way no one can inject malicious code!”

As cheat software (eg wall hacks & arrow cones up to aimbots) works by hooking into the rendering systems and intercepting calls to DirectX (plus adding new calls into the stream to render the overlay elements) then it seems like they took the policy (which they made clear before release and was written about in news posts when announced) to block everything and start whitelisting. So far that lists needs to be longer, but that should be fixed in time.

I’m using GeForce Experience and can stream the game (only with basic overlay support), do local capture (with rewind), and even have basic things like an accurate FPS counter. But I can only do this because it’s been whitelisted and the sort of injection/hooks it needs have been approved. As an online-only game it seems like this is something where we have very much already done a deal with the devil - this is a game you cannot buy because you can never run the thing on your system, you can only run it in cooperating with their system (which includes monitoring your system to ensure it accurately renders what it is meant to for the player).

We already have a far worse option: UWP. There Microsoft have decided to not allow any provider (even those who “own” the driver doing the actual rendering) to do anything within the stream (which breaks all the overlay info stuff like an accurate FPS counter and forces recording to be via the desktop capture mode that not all platforms provide, it even breaks the hooks used by nVidia to allow global shortcuts to trigger the capture). And that’s not even an anti-cheat system, it’s just MS making bad decisions with UWP and how an App ecosystem works for full-screen games.

They literally did. This was widely discussed during that PC beta (FAQ question from the support page: “Will this only impact third party applications during the Destiny 2 PC Beta?”). The overlays were disabled and capture didn’t work in full-screen without using the approved/whitelisted programs they listed in their support page.

If you have a dedicated capture system or are playing with an AMD or nVidia GPU (ie a system that meets the specs for this game) then you can stream and capture the game. But you can’t just use anything to do so, because it’s an online-only game and those run sandboxed to preserve the integrity of online play.

What you cannot do is inject overlaid information into the game (outside of the very short list of approved programs). This is an anti-cheat measure.

I feel like we have this conversation every time another round of VAC bans happen. Unfortunately it’s hard to assume good faith on the part of many who report they have been banned because of how often it turns out that actually they got correctly flagged for intentionally trying to cheat in a moderated online experience.

I get that. But people were posting elsewhere (maybe above as well, didn’t read the whole thread) that they got bans from Nvidia Geforce Experience etc. which are pretty unreasonable to ban. Discord as well given it’s popularity.

I feel like the game should at least warn you in the client that you have a ban-offending program running. I feel like you could easily have Discord overlays on without a second thought–as it hasn’t been an issue with other games as far as I know–and just get banned out of nowhere.
There must be a better way to handle this stuff, this is the first time I’ve heard of an anti-cheat system detecting OBS and Discord as violating offenses.
Furthermore the fact these bans are irreversible and unconditional is frustrating when it can be such an easy slip-up for the player.

A huge part of why people game on PC is because they are attached to programs like OBS and Discord. Really big misstep, probably gonna scare people so badly that they’re not gonna shell out the money for it.

We really need to wait for details/numbers before assuming things like Discord/OBS aren’t on a list in the anti-cheat software (so their attempts to inject into the program are disabled but doesn’t ban the account doing so - a silent failure of the intent of injecting because it is deemed not malicious, which is what appeared to happen in the beta).

If GeForce Experience is a bannable offence then we can wait for the numbers. The majority of gaming systems are nVidia and that software is the default way of getting drivers (needed to play Destiny 2) from the manufacturer and promotes the instant-rewind capture feature and overlay info heavily (as well as consoles normalising that as a feature of modern gaming systems). We’re going to see, even for a ban that only triggers on a specific version of GFE, hundreds of thousands of bans for such an incorrect ban. Possibly millions if D2 sells well on PC and it affects the current version of GFE. You can see my scepticism about that potentially being the case.

If OBS or Discord overlays are generating bans rather than being silently suppressed as “known behaviour, not supported” then we will also see very significant number of people affected. We’ll see “look, just load it up and five minutes later, ban” videos reporting to show that this is something you can try and how, because we know exactly why these bans are happening and Bungie need to fix it and work out who they banned in error. What we are claiming here is that everyone using Discord (with overlays enabled) or OBS while playing Destiny 2 will be banned in the next few days. If that is what is happening then we are expecting that to happen.

My bet is that we won’t because this has been tested, there is a whitelist for both allowing overlays and silently blocking them without repercussions because they’re not malicious. What we are seeing is a few false positives (as no system is perfect and Destiny 2 is a big game launch so lots of players) and a lot of people who had Discord or OBS up but also had CheatEngine or some DirectX dll injection active which the anti-cheat detected and used as grounds for a ban. Even if those things weren’t being used to cheat in PvP and just happened to be active and scanning/injecting due to a misconfiguration. Because every other time people get banned from online moderated play that turns out to be why almost all of them were banned.